


The Last Loose End

by tersa (alix)



Series: Mass Effect:Kait [2]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Colonist (Mass Effect), F/M, Paragade (Mass Effect), Past Relationship(s), Romance, Soldier (Mass Effect), Sole Survivor (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-19
Updated: 2011-09-19
Packaged: 2017-10-23 21:11:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/255011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alix/pseuds/tersa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kait Shepard and Kaidan Alenko's relationship is anything but clear after Horizon.</p><p>Everyone on her crew had the chance to lay their unfinished business to rest, but she's had no such opportunity. Before she heads through the Omega-4 Relay and possibly to her death, she tries to address that by writing him a letter.</p><p>(A couple of ME-savvy test readers have described this almost as a character study piece with an atypical approach to f!Shep and f!Shep/Kaidan. I have a few short stories knocking around in my head set in this playthrough, and this one serves as a good introduction to my custom soldier!Shep, Kait (Paragade/Colonist/Sole Survivor).)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Loose End

**Author's Note:**

> Concrit or feedback is welcome, but as this is my first foray into the Mass Effect fandom, please, be gentle with me. :)

“EDI.”

“Yes, Commander,” came EDI’s feminine-sounding synthesized voice.

“I need some privacy. Please put a do not disturb on the door and take off your aural sensors until I hit the Recall button. Unless there’s an emergency. I’ll trust you to decide when that is.”

“Yes, Commander. Privacy on.”

“Oh, and EDI?”

No response.

Good.

Kait went to the console on her desk and stared at it briefly. It was a new, upgraded Cerberus design and not quite like the older interfaces even on the Normandy SR-1. It took her a moment to figure out how to manually bring up the message program—she really had gotten used to the luxury of an AI taking care of things. She thought of the quarians and wondered briefly if humanity was going down that road.

Shaking the thought off as the irrelevancy it was at the moment, she put her hands on the back of the desk chair, then rejected the notion of sitting in it. Instead, her fingers curled tightly against the soft surface, leaving indentations in the padding beneath it.

“Begin transcription,” she said, waiting for the screen to respond and indicate it was ready. “Kaidan.”

His name appeared in text. She paused, staring at it. The cursor blinked back at her patiently, awaiting further input. Silence greeted the cursor, except the faint hiss of air from the life support system and the burbling of the filter in the wall-sized fish tank. She’d thought the tank a frivolous conceit when she’d first found it in her quarters, but there had been many a night when, after she’d retired to her bunk, she’d found herself staring into it, watching the fish go about their fishy lives. It had been oddly soothing, having the fish and the hamster, small lives that depended on her as much as the crew of the new Normandy did. But less demanding.

She was getting distracted, but with reason. She wanted to write this letter, but it was a difficult one to do.

 _Kaidan_ , she thought to herself, reading his name on the screen, and glanced to his photo next to it. It wasn’t a good photo, one she’d dug out of the public data files from an old news report, maybe one from his military profile. It helped, looking at it, because she could pretend she was talking to him while she dictated.

“By the time you get this message, I’ll probably be on the other side of the Omega-4 Relay. I know what you’re probably thinking—I’ve thought it all myself. It’s the opposite of the ‘being careful’ you asked of me, but it’s the best way we’ve come up with to stop the Collector attacks. The intel has tracked down that their homeworld is probably on the other side of the relay and the only way to probably navigate successfully is with Reaper technology. I keep waiting for it to blow up in my face, but it’s the best shot we think we have. Or a suicide mission. Maybe both.”

“The team I’ve pulled together, we’ve been spending the last few weeks tying up loose ends, saying our good-byes…”

She trailed off, thinking about it. Tali’s trial, Sidonis, Kolyat, Miranda’s sister and Jacob’s father: all those one things in life her teammates would regret leaving unfinished, distracting them from the job at hand. They’d traveled the galaxy laying the ghosts to rest for everyone…

…except her. Her family was dead, on Mindoir. Her marine unit dead on Akuze. She might’ve tried to contact Anderson, once, but he was head of the Council and had lied to her, even by omission, about Kaidan’s whereabouts. She’d seen Wrex and Liara, re-affirmed friendship with them in passing.

But they weren’t who was important to her. The one she _wanted_ to say good-bye to. Her regret. She wouldn’t be able to resolve this before she left, but she had to make the attempt. She’d died on him once before. “I couldn’t leave without contacting you.”

“You were mad at me on Horizon. I get that. I got mad at you, too, for some of the things you said. That you didn’t trust me. That hurt, Kaidan, more than I thought it would.”

His face flashed through her memory, not the bad holo photo, but the look of disgust as he’d backed away from her. The hurt slashed through her chest again, and she put a hand over her sternum, as if she could rip it from there with her fingers. She couldn’t, of course.

Bowing her head, she composed herself, her voice steady as she went on. “But I tried to see it from your side of things, and I realized that if I thought you were dead and you walked in, alive, hadn’t tried to let me know, and announced you were working with Cerberus, I would’ve been pissed off at you, too. It didn’t make everything better, but I at least understood. And then I got your message. I appreciated that, by the way. I hadn’t meant to confuse you or your life.”

 _Drinks with a doctor_. _Nothing serious_. They’d only had one night, but those words had jumped out of the message and stabbed at her heart. She hadn’t expected that, to be hurt by the idea that he’d moved on. “Two years. It’s been two years for you, but for me it had only been a few weeks since Alchera.”

Fire. Screaming. The shaking of a dying ship. Explosion. Free fall. Panic at losing air. Hitting atmo, and wondering which would kill her, asphyxiation or immolation. She didn’t know what had gotten her. They’d both been agony.

She closed her eyes, shuddering. She hadn’t thought of them in a long time. Dragging her mind back from the yawning abyss of madness, she said, “The last time I saw you, there on the Normandy. I know why you said what you did, and if we were anything other than what we are, I might have let you stay. But I’m glad you didn’t. I’m glad you made it, when I didn’t, and, more, I’m glad you knew me well enough to not let our relationship get in the way of our duty, even though we both knew it might be a fool’s mission. Was a fool’s mission. But at least I saved Joker,” she said in aside, lips curling up in a smile.

“This is like that, actually. I know I may not make it again, and I’m sorry—I really wish I could be careful, like you asked, but I’m hoping you still know me well enough to realize that I’d do it anyway, even if you asked me not to.”

She thought he’d known her, once. Her life was defined by loss, so making that connection with him, given who they were—Alliance, military, dedicated to the mission—had been all the more difficult, even without the regs against fraternization. She didn’t give her trust easily, but she’d trusted him implicitly.

“Back on Horizon, you got mad at me for not getting in contact with you once I woke up. I couldn’t get into it then, but I did try. I tried sending you messages through the relays—through Anderson, through Hackett. I don’t know if they got stopped by them, or even before they left the ship, but I sent them. Any time I ran into one of the people we knew, I asked about you, but everyone in the Alliance and the Council was closed-mouthed as to your whereabouts, and everyone outside of it, like Joker, Garrus and Tali, had no idea what had become of you. I don’t know what strange force was at work in the universe that we both wound up on Horizon at the same time, but I thank it. I’m glad I got to see you, to let you know, finally, I wasn’t dead. When they told me when I woke up it had been two years, the first thing I thought of was you.”

Heart beating fast, sweat on her brow, adrenaline filling her veins. _Two years._ She remembered Jacob’s voice, the look on his face, the smell of burning hydraulic fuel from the rogue mechs. The panic not at the fact that she’d died, but that Kaidan would think she was dead and the need to reassure him.

“As for Cerberus—“

She hesitated. She was going to encrypt this message and command EDI not to break it or send it on to the Illusive Man, but there was only so much she could trust either of those to work. The Illusive Man had more resources and information networks than she could even begin to comprehend, and who knew if he didn’t have failsafes in EDI to re-route or lose any messages from the ship that might compromise their security. _To hell with it,_ she thought. _If it doesn’t go out, there’s nothing I can do about it, and if it does go out and the Illusive Man knows, well, I might die on the other side, anyway, so it won’t matter._

“I think that’s the one thing I’m actually angry at you for. You know how I felt about Cerberus, and yet you refused even to listen to me. So, I’ll spell it out now, and hope you’ll read it.”

She couldn’t stand still anymore, ire turning into an energy that refused to stay contained, and began pacing. “I didn’t have any choice about Cerberus’s initial involvement. I was kind of _dead_ at the time,” she said with dry humor in her voice, that she wished could be conveyed in the cold text. “I found out that Liara was responsible for my body going to them and not the Shadow Broker, which I’m still conflicted over. Once I woke up and discovered what was going on, well, to be honest, I didn’t have much of a choice.”

“You said I betrayed the Alliance and everything you and I stood for, but that’s a convenient half-truth. I was—am—a Spectre. You of all people should know what that means, and what it means to me. My heart is still with the Alliance, but I have more to think of than just them. I answer to the Council, my duty is to protect its interests, and I have the license to use whatever means at my disposal to do that. I woke up to a galaxy where the Alliance and the Council were passing off what happened at the Citadel all those years ago as merely being the geth. You and I both know what kind of bullshit that is. The Reapers are still out there, and the Illusive Man’s intel suggested some kind of connection between the Collectors and the Reapers. Not to mention the fact that entire human colonies were disappearing. I worked _with_ Cerberus—not for—because they were the only ones out there willing to give me what I needed to do my damn job. I didn’t betray the Alliance or the Council—they betrayed me. They’re betraying all of us by ignoring the threat.”

She hadn’t realized how angry she was for that until she said the words. The muscle in her jaw hurt from clenching her teeth together, her fingernails cut into the palms of her hands where she balled her fists. She put her back to the console, looking at the fish swimming placidly in the water until she could trust herself to speak rationally again.

“They’re Protheans, you know, the Collectors. Re-purposed, just like the Keepers at the Citadel, to do the bidding of the Reapers. I’m telling you this in case you can use it. Dr. Mordin Solus, the salarian scientist on my team, figured it out when we found that damn Collector ship that blew up the Normandy. Our Normandy.” She remembered finding the Collector corpse aboard the ship, and EDI’s clinical report of the DNA analysis she’d performed. And then the aftermath. “You were right. Cerberus, or at least the Illusive Man, can’t be trusted. That mission to the ship had been a set-up by them, to get me there to get that information but the bait to keep the Collectors there for me to arrive. They seem to have a personal interest in me, thanks to Sovereign. I can see the Illusive Man’s logic to all this, but he uses his people like pawns on a chessboard. In that analogy, I think I’m his queen, but even the queen can be sacrificed if it will save the king, and his king is the human race.”

She was struck by a thought and rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. “That reminds me—the geth. I need to get this out to you, you’ll need to do something with it. It’s complicated, but I found out…I found one, talked to one. I know this probably sounds crazy, I wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t happened to me, but it did. It said that all those geth we were killing back then, the ones following Saren, weren’t all the geth, just a subset of them that had decided the Reapers are gods. There is another entire set of geth out there who don’t believe that and just want to be left alone. The one I found, it’d been following me ever since Eden Prime. There’s a piece of my damn _armor_ attached to its chest, which it won’t explain, but—yes, I know it’s insane, but I think it attaches some kind of special significance to it. It’s _important_ to it, I think” She remembered the tone of Legion's voice, and she would have sworn she’d detected reluctance to discuss that piece of armor. “It saved our lives, mine and Tali’s, and…I’m inclined to believe its intentions.”

“It gave me a chance to stop all the heretic geth, it called them, and I took it. A virus intended to re-program them into forgetting their worship of the Reapers and re-align with the other geth, the ones who were not involved with the battles we fought. It was either that, or killing all of them. I was tempted. I think you can understand why. But the geth played a recording of one asking if it had a soul, and…I don’t think it was a ruse.” _Do I have a soul?_ The tone—how could a machine have tone? But the one in the recording did, and it was the same kind of existential questioning she remembered when she’d been picked up on Mindoir, _Why me?_ “They’re self-aware. They’re asking the same questions of their creators that humanity has throughout the millennia. Either way, I was playing God, and it’s not a position I’m comfortable with. I may have made a huge mistake, if the geth was lying to me, by leaving that many alive, or I may have gained us unexpected allies in the eventuality of the Reapers coming, like the rachni queen.”

“Which I forgot to mention to you, but I got a message from that queen I released on Noveria. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I _think_ she was telling me there may have been some kind of outside influence—maybe the Collectors, maybe the Reapers--that had something to do with causing the Rachni War. I think she was offering an alliance with us.”

“Commander,” EDI’s voice interrupted.

Kait scowled, but tried to keep the worst of the surly out of her voice with her clipped, “Yes, EDI, what is it?”

“I wanted to inform you that we’re fifteen minutes out from our destination.”

“Thank you, EDI. Let the team know I’ll meet them down in the shuttle bay in ten minutes. Re-engage privacy mode.”

“Yes, Commander.”

It took a moment to gather her train of thought, and she bent over the chair to read back what was on the screen, deleting her interaction with EDI before continuing. “I don’t have much time. The technology we found to try to get through the Omega-4 Relay intact is almost online, and as soon as it is, we’ll be gone. Probably in a few hours, but I have one last thing I have to do before that. I just wanted to let you know—“ She broke off, memories crowding out the words. _Do you even remember that night before Ilos? That night meant everything to me... maybe it meant as much to you._ Those words in his message were seared into her brain.

As if she could forget. They’d been dancing around mutual attraction for weeks, through Eden Prime and Virmire. When faced with having to chose between Kaidan and Ashley, she’d chosen to save Kaidan. It was the logical choice, he was the leader of the Normandy’s marine unit to Ashley, who was just another marine, but deep down inside, she recognized she’d let her personal feelings for him get in the way. She couldn’t save both of them, so she'd decided to try to save the one she cared about.

 _Do you have something up your sleeve? Of course you do, that’s why I love you._ Those weren’t the words he’d said, but what he’d wanted to say. He’d said them again on Horizon. _I loved you._ She should have known he’d loved her, that he wouldn’t have let his guard down like that unless he had, not after what he’d said about Rahna. She’d been flattered, but hadn’t reciprocated—he was still her subordinate, she his CO—even after he’d come to her quarters that night. _What’s ignoring the regs about fraternization after committing mutiny?_ She’d taken him because she wanted to, because she was afraid, because they were _alive_ , telling herself they’d figure everything out when they had time, when they weren’t confronting the greatest threat the Council had ever faced or on mission in the aftermath.

She’d died before they ever found the time.

She’d had nothing but time since then, alone in her quarters here on the new Normandy. To think over that night and feelings that, to her, were still new and raw, not two years old. Seeing him on Horizon, getting his message. It was hard to reconcile that so much time had passed for him, that he’d thought her dead all that time and moved on, while she…hadn’t, still stuck in his past.

 _Do you even remember that night before Ilos?_ Of course she did, the taste of his mouth as her tongue entered it, sliding against his, the musky scent of his skin after a day’s work, the feel of him moving inside her, the look of ecstasy on his face, limned in the cool blue light, the sound of the throaty cry he made when he climaxed, hard body taut against hers.

Had that night meant as much to her? She still didn’t know the answer.

She glanced at the last words up on the screen and tried to find the thread of her thoughts, what she wanted to say. _I just wanted to let you know…_ “that night was special to me. More than I realized at the time. I regret—my biggest regret—about all this is not having the chance to figure it out what it is between us, that there may never be a time when things are settled to give us that opportunity.”

Fingers went to the bridge of her nose to pinch, steadying herself to finish the letter. “I hope I’m coming back from this, and if I do, I want to do drinks with you, on the Citadel, on Earth, I don’t care, wherever. I’m going to deserve it if we pull this off, and if I’m right, you can apologize to me in person for being an ass on Horizon. And if I’m wrong, you can tell me ‘I told you so’. If I don’t make it back—I’m sorry to put you through this again. It’s the last thing I wanted. But hopefully if this is a one-way trip, I’ll take the bastards down so they can’t hurt any more Alliance colonies.”

“Take care, Kaidan. Never give up on who you are.”

She hit save then read through the letter once to make sure she hadn’t missed anything critical.

“Ten minutes, Commander.”

“Thanks, EDI.”

Her fingers danced over the screen, pulling up the encryption software to seal the letter, addressing it to Commander Kaidan Alenko, Citadel, care of Councillor David Anderson, remembering she’d forgotten to say how proud she was of his promotion, but then dismissing it as a smaller regret in a sea of larger ones.

She hesitated over the passcode. They’d had no need to set up ciphers in the past, and no way to communicate one now. She wracked her brain, and put one further note on the outside of the message where he could read it.

 _Vigil_.

Hopefully, he would remember the Prothean VI, the one only he and Tali had seen with her. Hopefully it would be enough for him to guess ‘Ilos’ as the password, which she keyed in. And that he would understand the significance of it, even before reading the letter.

She hit the Recall button and said, “EDI.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“The message on my terminal—I need you to send it out just before we enter the Omega-4 Relay.” A thought occurred to her, “EDI, do you have any instructions in your programming preventing you from sending messages out from me to anyone outside of Cerberus?”

“There are no such known instructions, Commander, but there may be ones behind a block.”

“Which you wouldn’t be able to tell me about, even if I asked,” Kait said with dry exasperation. “I guess I’ll just have to hope. Send it out just before we enter the Relay. As captain of the Normandy, I’m requesting that it be delivered, that no copy of it be sent to anywhere but the address on the letter, and that no notification be sent to anyone other than the recipient that the message was sent, especially not the Illusive Man or any other employee of Cerberus. Once delivered, you will erase the letter from your memory banks along with any record of it being sent out.”

“Understood, Commander.”

Kait shut down the terminal then glanced at the picture. Stretching out her arm, she grazed her fingertips along the top edge of the frame then halfway down the side before letting them fall away. “It’ll have to be enough,” she said to the empty cabin, then turned on her heel and headed out for the rendezvous in the shuttle bay.


End file.
